Judith Collins has zero tolerance for zero tolerance campaigns

Apparently our Police minister wants more criminals caught, and fewer people fined for going 1 km/h over the speed limit.

Judith Collins said today that she’s not a big fan of zero tolerance speeding campaigns.

“never been a big fan of the absolute restrictions on speed and I think you’ll find there will be fewer police officers on the road.”

In 2013 more than 250 were killed and in 2014 the figure increased to nearly 300, while last year 321 people died in road accidents.

This year 135 people have been killed, three higher than the same time last year.

Ms Collins said a funding shakeup will mean less money to spend on road safety and 100 fewer officers on patrol.

“Police will still have funding but not for as much road policing as they had. So they’ll put that into burglaries and other things.”

I appreciate that police have targets to reduce the number of deaths and serious injuries on our roads, but there is a rate of diminishing returns. More amusingly, the numbers have been going up during the low tolerance periods. Amusingly in the sense that catching people speeding by a small margin clearly isn’t a factor in road fatalities.

The fact it needs the Minister to pull the police’s heads out of their arses to state what we’ve all seen is a bit surprising.

– One News

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As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. And when he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet, and as a result he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist that takes no prisoners.